by Peter Corris
‘Gidday, Bert. Thought you’d be fishing.’
Bert carefully folded the business section of the Herald. I wondered if he’d been checking the price of gold. ‘Cliff. Been out, hours ago. Got a few flathead. We’ll have ‘em for lunch. Good for the heart, or so they reckon.’
‘Heart?’
‘Yah. They say I’ve got a crook ticker. Feel all right, but.’
I mounted the steps and moved out of the sun behind the shadecloth. The temperature dropped immediately. ‘How much land’ve you got here?’
‘About three acres, give or take a few rods and perches. That dump back there went up in the Depression.’
I jerked my thumb to the right. ‘What about the house on stilts?’
Bert laughed. ‘They reckoned they’d be able to see the water if they went up like that. Might be able to see it from the roof.’
‘No other close neighbours?’
‘Yeah, there’s another place like this further back. Can’t see it from here, but. Jeez, my manners’re ratshit since Jessie died. Have a seat.’
I dropped into a deckchair and heard the sand crunch under it as the legs moved. Great sound.
‘Not too early for a beer, is it, Cliff?’
‘Got a light?’
‘Coopers, only one I’ll drink.’
He went into the house, heavy-footed and slightly bandy in thongs and flapping grey shorts, and returned with two stubbies. We uncapped them and drank, toasting the Australian way of life for those who were lucky enough to get a piece of it.
‘How’d you come to be digging holes?’
‘Planting a few vegetables. Jessie used to do it and I just thought I’d… Anyway, I hoed up a patch and started to turn it over. Not too sandy just there. Shovel went in and hit the box. I cleared the dirt off and opened it. Then I put everything back and finished making the vegetable patch. Want to take a look?’
‘No time like the present. But I’ll have to take a sample of the gold and get a good look at the gun and the photo. I can’t do it crouching in the dirt.’
Bert rubbed the grey bristles on his chin. ‘The box can stay put though?’
‘For the time being, yes.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘Sure no-one’s around?’
‘Stan, the derro in the shack, sleeps it off till noon. He’s a useless bastard. I don’t have anything to do with him, but Jessie said he had some kind of a right to the place. The yuppies in the stilt house’ll be staring out to sea. Can’t see the spot real well from the other place. Oh, there’s some boatsheds on the beach and a couple of blokes live in them sometimes. Dunno what you could see from there, but they sometimes wander through a corner of the place to get down there. ‘S all right by me as long as they don’t drop their rubbish.’
I was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, sport socks and sneakers, good digging clothes. I followed Bert around the back of the house and waited while he reached under the back porch for a shovel. I took it from him and checked the shaft for splinters. ‘Let me start earning your money.’
He laughed. ‘Tell you the truth, I’m glad of your company. Tom never comes up here when I’m around. Brings, his mates from time to time. Here we go.’
The area behind the house was thick with kikuyu grass that needed slashing. There were a few shrubs and flower beds that had become weed-choked. Jessie, the gardener, was sorely missed. The vegetable patch was in full sunlight near the stump of a wattle. Bert pointed to the left.
‘Jessie grew the vegetables over there, see. But those bloody wattles grew up and the place doesn’t get much sun now.’ He kicked the stump. ‘This bugger rotted out and blew down and I reckoned that was the spot. Lucky, eh?’
‘We’ll see.’
Bert had cleared away a few square metres of matted grass and turned the loamy soil. He had tomatoes and beans on stakes. That is, the packets were thumbtacked to the wood. No sign of the vegetables. The pumpkins were doing well though, the vines snaking over the cleared spot and off into the kikuyu.
‘Right in the bloody middle,’ Bert said.
As a reflex action, God knows why, I spat on my hands before I wielded the shovel. The earth had been recently disturbed and after taking out one big shovelful, the blade hit the box on the next thrust. I worked for ten minutes shovelling it to the sides and scraping it away until the oilcloth came in view. I scraped away the earth and pulled at the wrapping until the lid was clear. It was a medium-sized sea chest that had once had a thin leather veneer over the metal. Moisture had got in under the oilcloth and this had long since rotted away, leaving a pitted, rusty surface beneath. That was encouraging; it looked as if the box had been in the ground a fair while. Two heavy clasps held the lid down. I cleared the dirt from around them and prized them open without much effort, using the screwdriver attachment on my Swiss Army knife.
‘When did you find this thing, Bert?’
He removed the old hat he had put on and scratched his head where hair hadn’t grown for many a long day. ‘I dunno. Couple of weeks ago?’
The lid opened easily and there they were- bars of dull, yellowish metal the size of cigarette cartons. They were irregular in shape and it was no use looking for serial numbers-this wasn’t bullion in the accepted sense. I hefted a bar and couldn’t guess at the weight.
‘You didn’t take them out to weigh them, did you?’
‘No fear. I know weights, but. It’s like I said, round about 60 kilos. Take a look at the other stuff.’
What I took to be the Colt was wrapped in chamois. The photograph was in a plastic sleeve of the kind used to hold bank passbooks back when people used such things. I took both items out of the box and handed them up to Bert. ‘Got a tarp or something? Wouldn’t want all this to get wet.’
Bert looked up at the cloudless sky, laughed, and tramped off towards his storage area under the porch. I opened the sharpest blade on the knife and took a long, thick paring from one of the gold bars. I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in my pocket. Then I closed the chest after moving several of the bars and feeling around to make sure there was nothing else inside. Bert came back and we threw a tarpaulin over the whole patch and weighted it down at the corners with chunks of firewood.
‘You’re a trusting soul,’ I said to Bert as we moved back towards the house.
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s to stop me bashing you and taking off with the lot?’
He grunted. ‘If I was that bad a judge of character I’d bloody deserve it.’
Good point, I thought.
We went into the house through the back door to the cool, dark kitchen. Bert lifted two holland blinds, turned on an overhead light and put the pistol and photo under it on the kitchen table. He opened the fridge and took out two more light beers. I was sweating after the exertion and swigged the drink gratefully. We sat down and I unwrapped the pistol. It was the standard, slide-action model and still had a very slight oil sheen. The magazine and breech were empty.
‘Old?’ Bert said hopefully.
‘Can’t tell.’ I picked the gun up and looked it over. ‘Serial number’s gone, of course. That’s the best way to tell. The thing is, a well-maintained weapon like this can be quite old and a neglected one can be new but look like shit. An expert’d be able to tell, maybe.’
‘What about the picture?’
I slid it out of the sleeve. Again, it had been carefully looked after. There was nothing written on the reverse. The photo showed a youngish woman, dark with big eyes and bold, handsome features. My research into female fashion had done no good at all. The hairstyle was a short crop and there was no way to date her clothes because she wasn’t wearing any. She was quite naked apart from a wide black ribbon with a pearl set in it around her neck.
Her figure was good, neither trained-down thin in the modern manner nor robust as in days gone by. Her expression was amused and there was something about the pose and attitude that was hard to grasp. There was something sexually a
mbiguous about it-or was there? Who or what was she looking at? I tried to imagine the photographer and couldn’t. I sucked down the rest of the beer.
‘How old?’ Bert said. ‘The photo, not the girl.’
‘Jesus, Bert, how can you tell? She’s not holding up a copy of the Telegraph.’
‘Good-looking sheila.’
‘Right. Someone must know who she is, or was. That’s a start.’
‘Reckon she’s a pro?’
‘Could be.’
Pros, guns and gold. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
I knew what he was thinking but my mind wasn’t running on the same track. I’m as keen on money as the next man and always in need of it, but this matter was intriguing me in an almost disinterested or theoretical way. Who was she and why did she matter so much to someone? And who was that someone? The beer suddenly had a sour taste in my throat as I considered the possibility that the woman could also be buried out in Bert’s backyard. I rejected the idea, but it nagged at me.
‘What d’you reckon, Cliff?’
I rewrapped the pistol and put the photo back in its sleeve. ‘I reckon I’ll have a swim, do some thinking and then start work, probably after those flathead.’
In the afternoon, I strolled around the locality, checking on the other residents who had a view of, or were likely to have spent any time close to, Bert’s place. Apart from anyone staying in the boatsheds, they all had their own tracks to the beach and the trees very deliberately gave each block a good deal of privacy. I told the young couple in the pole house that I was looking for a property to buy in the area. They had sussed the place very thoroughly before making their own purchase, and they were happy to pass their information on. This block was swampy, that had a dodgy title, another had been the site of a council rubbish tip in the Fifties. Bert’s block was the best of the lot.
‘We’d have bought it if we could, wouldn’t we, darling?’ Greg said to Fiona.
‘Oh, yes. But Mr Russell didn’t want to sell.’
I told them I was staying with Mr Russell. I didn’t tell them what he thought about their pole house.
The house behind Bert’s was unoccupied and had a ‘For Sale’ sign with a ‘Sold’ sticker across it. The place wore an air of neglect and disappointment and I went along with Greg and Fiona’s suspicion that the sale had fallen through. Bert was right about the increase in value. This house, not as big or as well-placed as Bert’s, had fetched two hundred and twenty thousand, theoretically.
The boatsheds were set into the rock behind the dunes and comprised every kind of building material known to Australian man-galvanised iron, weatherboard, flattened kerosene tins, masonite and malthoid. They had the look of structures built during the Great Depression when people found and made shelters wherever they could. These were classics, with slipways down to the water made from railway sleepers and hooks cemented into the rocks that had evidently supported blocks and tackle.
Two men were sitting on the rocks in the thin shade provided by a spindly banksia. They wore singlets, baggy shorts and grey stubble. One of the men was scrubbing at a pair of once-white, now-grey sandshoes with a piece of soap-impregnated steel wool; the other was smoking and looking at the water.
‘Gidday,’ I said.
‘Gidday, mate,’ the smoker said. ‘Want a beer?’
‘No, thanks.’ I squatted down, took off my Sydney Swans cap and used it to dry the sweat on my face. ‘Mind answering a few questions?’
‘Shit,’ the smoker said. ‘You from the Council?’
‘Private detective. No trouble for you and your mate.’ I took out two twenty-dollar notes and fanned myself with them. ‘You blokes been coming down here long?’
The scrubber looked at the money and put his ratty bit of steel wool down on a rock, anxious to please. ‘Fuckin’ years, mate. In the nice weather. Mind you, it’s good weather here most of the time.’
I pointed back behind the rocks. ‘You come through Bert Russell’s place to get here?’
The smoker butted his rollie, got out his tin and prepared to make what was probably his millionth cigarette. He coughed cavernously as he did it, but his fingers were rock steady. ‘That’s right. Good bloke, Bert. He doesn’t mind. Slings us the odd can.’
‘Did you ever see anything unusual going on up at Bert’s place when he wasn’t there?’
‘Whaddya mean, unusual?’ the scrubber said.
I shrugged. ‘People around. Cars you hadn’t seen before. Anyone scratching about.’
The smoker shook his head. “The young bloke comes up with his mates and gets pissed. That’s about all.’
‘I mean further back than that. Years ago.’
I was banking on the fact that elderly people have sharper memories of the distant past than last week or the week before. The scrubber seemed interested all of a sudden. He took two cans from the esky and tossed one to his mate, who caught it deftly.
‘Hang on, Merv.’ The scrubber stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Clarrie an’ this is Merv, by the way.’
I shook both hands. ‘Cliff.’
“There was this one time,’ Clarrie said. ‘There was a flash car and that woman, you remember Merv.’
Merv grunted, lit his cigarette and blew smoke.
Clarrie opened his can. ‘His memory’s not as good as mine, ‘specially for women. Can’t get it up any more, can you mate.’
‘Get fucked,’ Merv said, popping his can.
Clarrie cackled. ‘Wish I could. Anyway, I’m a bit forgetful about yesterday and the day before, like, but I can remember things real clear back a bit. We were coming down here from the pub, real late. Fuckin’ hot night and we saw this car parked near Bert’s place. Big, flash car. And there was a woman in it. She opened the door and I seen her in the light. A bloody good-looker. Not Bert’s missus. She was a good sort, mind, that Jessie when she was young, but this was a real looker.’
‘Bullshit,’ Merv said and drank at least half of his can.
Clarrie was trying hard not to look at the money but he wanted it badly, and that made it hard to judge his story. ‘When was this?’ I said.
‘Now I can tell you that, sort of. It was the night that Gough Whitlam beat that little bat-eared cunt. What was his name? What year was that?’
‘McMahon,’ I said. ‘1972.’ Good news, Bert, I thought. Near enough to twenty-five years.
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of a car?’
‘Jeez, what was it, Merv?’
‘A Merc. White Merc’
‘I thought you didn’t see it,’ I said.
‘I remember now.’ Merv drained his can and made as if to throw it into the scrub. He remembered I was there and just crushed it in his hard hands.
‘Good on you, mate,’ Clarrie said.
It was impossible to tell now what weight to give to the story. I questioned them about what the occupants of the car were doing but Clarrie admitted that he didn’t know. There was a man around but he thought he might have just been taking a piss in the bushes.
Merv laughed. ‘ You were taking a few pisses in the bush that night. Shit, we were shickered after winnin’ the fuckin’ election.’
Which might have been a confirmation of a kind, but didn’t really increase my confidence in the information. I took the photograph out of the plastic sleeve and showed it to Clarrie, keeping my hand across the woman’s body and showing only her face. ‘Could this be the woman you saw, Clarrie?’
He rubbed his eyes and tried to blink away the effect of decades of sun, salt, sand and booze. Merv reached into the esky for another can but Clarrie seemed to have forgotten his.
‘Yeah,’ he said, drawing the word out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘The woman I saw looked like this one. She had on this tight dress. Great tits. Let’s see her tits.’
I put the picture away, gave them the money and took a can of beer from the esky. I plodded away along the dunes to the track that led
up to the shack on Bert’s block. I’d have bet any money that Merv’s can went into the ti-tree as soon as my back was turned.
It was hot, even in the shade, and there was no breeze to speak of. The shack was more solidly built than the boatsheds and had been less exposed to the weather, but it was still a crumbling ruin with cracked and broken window panes, a sagging roof and a list to the right where some hardy vine was trying to pull it down.
There was only one door and it opened as I put my foot on the plastic milk crate that served as a doorstep. The man who stood there had once been an athlete; you could tell from the set of his shoulders and the lines of his body inside a gaping, buttonless pair of pyjamas. But that was a long time and many bottles ago. He was a once-sound but now battered and faded ruin, like his house.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Name’s Cliff Hardy. I’m doing a job of work for Bert Russell.’ I stuck out my right hand to be shaken and held the can of beer close by in the left. If you wanted the one you had to take the other. ‘Merv and Clarrie sent this up for you.’
We shook hands. The bones stuck out through the thin, dry skin. He dropped my hand, grabbed the can and popped the top immediately. He slightly tilted his grey, grizzled head; the faded pale blue eyes slid back as he raised the can to a mouth that was just a space, the lips having sunk into the toothless hole. He sucked the beer down in three long gulps, barely pausing to take in two wheezy breaths. I produced another twenty-dollar note.
‘I need to talk to you, Stan.’
He wiped his mouth and looked at me as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. ‘It’s happened, has it?’
‘What?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes went shrewd. ‘You first. Better sit down.’
I thought he meant we should go inside but he merely kicked the milk crate away from the door with his bare foot and squatted down in the doorway with his feet dangling. I sat on the milk crate while he took a last, pessimistic suck on the can.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Forever.’